by Dick Francis
The largest bottom drawer still contained the plastic sacks of hops. I pulled open the neck of one of them and found only the expected strong-smelling crop: closed the neck again, moving the bag slightly to settle it back into its place, and saw that under the bags of hops lay a brown leather briefcase, ordinary size, six inches deep.
With a feeling of wasting time I hauled it out onto the working surface on top of the drawers, and tried to open it.
Both catches were locked. I fished for the keys in my trousers pocket and with the smallest of the picks delicately twisted until the mechanisms clicked.
Opened the lid. Found no bottles of dog shampoo, but other things that turned me slowly to a state of stone.
The contents looked at first sight as if the case belonged to a doctor: stethoscope, pen torch, metal instruments, all in fitted compartments. A cardboard box without its lid held four or five small tubes of antibiotic ointment. A large bottle contained only a few small white pills, the bottle labelled with a long name I could scarcely read, let alone remember, with ‘diuretic’ in brackets underneath. A pad of prescription forms, blank, ready for use.
It was the name and address rubber-stamped onto the prescription forms and the initials heavily embossed in gold into the leather beneath the case’s handle which stunned me totally.
I.A.P. on the case.
Ian A. Pargetter on the prescriptions.
Ian Pargetter, veterinary surgeon, address in Newmarket.
His case had vanished the night he died.
This case…
With fingers beginning to shake I took one of the tubes of antibiotics and some of the diuretic pills and three of the prescription forms and added them to my other spoils, and then with a heart at least beating at about twice normal speed checked that everything was in its place before closing the case.
I felt as much as heard the surgery door open, the current of air reaching me at the same instant as the night sounds. I turned thinking that one of Calder’s lads had come on some late hospital rounds and wondering how I could ever explain my presence; and I saw that no explanation at all would do.
It was Calder himself crossing the threshold. Calder with the light on his curly halo, Calder who should have been a hundred miles away talking to the nation on the tube.
His first expression of surprise turned immediately to grim assessment, his gaze travelling from the medicine bottle of tonic mixture on the workbench to the veterinary case lying open. Shock, disbelief and fury rose in an instantly violent reaction, and he acted with such speed that even if I’d guessed what he would do I could hardly have dodged.
His right arm swung in an arc, coming down against the wall beside the door and pulling from the bracket which held it a slim scarlet fire extinguisher. The swing seemed to me continuous. The red bulbous end of the fire extinguisher in a split second filled my vision and connected with a crash against my forehead, and consciousness ceased within a blink.
The world came back with the same sort of on—off switch: one second I was unaware, the next, awake. No grey area of daze, no shooting stars, simply on—off, off—on.
I was lying on my back on some smelly straw in an electrically lit horse box with a brown horse peering at me suspiciously from six feet above.
I couldn’t remember for a minute how I’d got there; it seemed such an improbable position to be in. Then I had a recollection of a red ball crashing above my eyes, and then, in a snap, total recall of the evening.
Calder.
I was in a box in Calder’s yard. I was there because, presumably, Calder had put me there.
Pending? I wondered.
Pending what?
With no reassuring thoughts I made the moves to stand up, but found that though consciousness was total, recovery was not. A whirling dizziness set the walls tilting, the grey concrete blocks seeming to want to lean in and fall on me. Cursing slightly I tried again more slowly and made it to one elbow with eyes balancing precariously in their sockets.
The top half of the stable door abruptly opened with the sound of an unlatching bolt. Calder’s head appeared in the doorway, his face showing shock and dismay as he saw me awake.
‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that you’d be unconscious… that you wouldn’t know. I hit you so hard… you’re suppose to be out.’ His voice saying these bizarre words sounded nothing but normal.
‘Calder…’ I said.
He was looking at me no longer with anger but almost with apology. ‘I’m sorry, Tim,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you came.’
The walls seemed to be slowing down.
‘Ian Pargetter…’ I said. ‘Did you… kill him? Not you?’
Calder produced an apple and fed it almost absentmindedly to the horse. ‘I’m sorry, Tim. He was so stubborn. He refused…’ He patted the horse’s neck. ‘He wouldn’t do what I wanted. Said it was over, he’d had enough. Said he’d stop me, you know.’ He looked for a moment at the horse and then down to me. ‘Why did you come? I’ve liked you. I wish you hadn’t.’
I tried again to stand up and the whirling returned as before. Calder took a step backwards, but only one, stopping when he saw my inability to arise and charge.
‘Ginnie,’ I said. ‘Not Ginnie… Say it wasn’t you who hit Ginnie…’
He simply looked at me, and didn’t say it. In the end he said merely, and with clear regret, ‘I wish I’d hit you harder… but it seemed… enough.’ He moved another step backwards so that I could see only the helmet of curls under the light and dark shadows where his eyes were; and then while I was still struggling to my knees he closed the half door and bolted it, and from outside switched off the light.
Night-blindness made it even harder to stand up but at least I couldn’t see the walls whirl, only feel they were spinning. I found myself leaning against one of them and ended more or less upright, spine supported, brain at last settling into equilibrium.
The grey oblong of window gradually detached itself from the blackness, and when my equine companion moved his head I saw the liquid reflection of an eye.
Window… way out.
I slithered round the walls to the window and found it barred on the inside, not so much to keep horses in, I supposed, but to prevent them breaking the glass. Five strong bars, in any case, were set in concrete top and bottom, as secure as any prison cell, and I shook them impotently with two hands in proving them immovable.
Through the dusty window panes I had a sideways view across the yard towards the surgery, and while I stood there and held onto the bars and watched, Calder went busily in and out of the open lighted doorway, carrying things from the surgery to his car. I saw what I was sure was Ian Pargetter’s case go into the boot, and remembered with discomfiture that I’d left the bunch of picks in one of its locks. I saw him carry also an armful of the jars which contained unlabelled capsules and several boxes of unguessable contents, stowing them in the boot carefully and closing them in.
Calder was busy obliterating his tracks.
I yelled at him, calling his name, but he didn’t even hear or turn his head. The only result was startled movement in the horse behind me, a stamping of hooves and a restless swinging round the box.
‘All right,’ I said soothingly. ‘Steady down. All right. Don’t be frightened.’
The big animal’s alarm abated, and through the window I watched Calder switch off the surgery light, lock the door, get into his car and drive away.
He drove away out of his driveway, towards the main road, not towards his house. The lights of his car passed briefly over the trees as he turned out through the gates, and then were gone: and I seemed suddenly very alone, imprisoned in that dingy place for heaven knew how long.
Vision slowly expanded so that from the dim light of the sky I could see again the outlines within the box: walls, manger… horse. The big dark creature didn’t like me being there and wouldn’t settle, but I could think of no way to relieve him of my presence.
The ceiling was solid, n
ot as in some stables open through the rafters to the roof. In many it would have been possible for an agile man to climb the partition from one box to the next, but not here; and in any case there was no promise of being better off next door. One would be in a different box but probably just as simply and securely bolted in.
There was nothing in my trousers pockets but a handkerchief. Penknife, money and house keys were all in my jacket in the boot of my own unlocked car out on the road. The dark jersey which had seemed good for speed, quiet and concealment had left me without even a coin for a screwdriver.
I thought concentratedly of what a man could do with his fingers that a horse couldn’t do with superior strength, but found nothing in the darkness of the door to unwind or unhinge; nothing anywhere to pick loose. It looked most annoyingly as if that was where I was going to stay until Calder came back.
And then… what?
If he’d intended to kill me, why hadn’t he already made sure of it? Another swipe or two with the fire extinguisher would have done… and I would have known nothing about it.
I thought of Ginnie, positive now that that was how it had been for her, that in one instant she had been thinking, and in the next… not.
Thought of Ian Pargetter, dead from one blow of his own brass lamp. Thought of Calder’s shock and grief at the event, probably none the less real despite his having killed the man he mourned. Calder shattered over the loss of a business friend… the friend he had himself struck down.
He must have killed him, I thought, on a moment’s ungovernable impulse, for not… what had he said?… for not wanting to go on, for wanting to stop Calder doing… what Calder planned.
Calder had struck at me with the same sort of speed: without pause for consideration, without time to think of consequences. And he had lashed at me as a friend too, without hesitation, while saying shortly after that he liked me.
Calder, swinging the fire extinguisher, had ruthlessly aimed at killing the man who had saved his life.
Saved Calder’s life… Oh God, I thought, why ever did I do it?
The man in whom I had wanted to see only goodness had after that day killed Ian Pargetter, killed Ginnie: and if I hadn’t saved him they would both have lived.
The despair of that thought filled me utterly, swelling with enormity, making me feel, as the simpler grief for Ginnie had done, that one’s body couldn’t hold so much emotion. Remorse and guilt could rise like dragons’ teeth from good intentions, and there were in truth unexpected paths to hell.
I thought back to that distant moment that had affected so many lives: to that instinctive reflex, faster than thought, which had launched me at Ricky’s knife. If I could have called it back I would have been looking away, not seeing, letting Calder die… letting Ricky take his chances, letting him blast his young life to fragments, destroy his caring parents.
One couldn’t help what came after.
A fireman or a lifeboatman or a surgeon might fight to the utmost stretch of skill to save a baby and find he had let loose a Hitler, a Nero, Jack the Ripper. It couldn’t always be Beethoven or Pasteur whose life one extended. All one asked was an ordinary, moderately sinful, normally well-intentioned, fairly harmless human. And if he cured horses… all the better.
Before that day at Ascot Calder couldn’t even have thought, of owning Sandcastle, because Sandcastle at that moment was in mid-career with his stud value uncertain. But Calder had seen, as we all had, the majesty of that horse, and I had myself listened to the admiration in his voice.
At some time after that he must have thought of selenium, and from there the wickedness had grown to encompass us all: the wickedness which would have been extinguished before birth if I’d been looking another way.
I knew logically that I couldn’t have not done what I did; but in heart and spirit that didn’t matter. It didn’t stop the engulfing misery or allow me any ease.
Grief and sorrow came to us all, Pen had said: and she was right.
The horse became more restive and began to paw the ground.
I looked at my watch, the digital figures bright in the darkness: twenty minutes or thereabouts since Calder had left. Twenty minutes that already seemed like twenty hours.
The horse swung round suddenly in the gloom with unwelcome vigour, bumping against me with his rump.
‘Calm down now, boy,’ I said soothingly. ‘We’re stuck with each other. Go to sleep.’
The horse’s reply was the equivalent of unprintable: the crash of a steel-clad hoof against a wall.
Perhaps he didn’t like me talking, I thought, or indeed even moving about. His head swung round towards the window, his bulk stamping restlessly from one side of the box to the other, and I saw that he, unlike Oliver’s horses, wore no head-collar: nothing with which to hold him, while I calmed him, patting his neck.
His head reared up suddenly, tossing violently, and with a foreleg he lashed forward at the wall.
Not funny, I thought. Horrific to have been in the firing-line of that slashing hoof. For heaven’s sake, I said to him mentally, I’ll do you no harm. Just stay quiet. Go to sleep.
I was standing at that time with my back to the door, so that to the horse I must have been totally in shadow: but he would know I was there. He could smell my presence, hear my breathing. If he could see me as well, would it be better?
I took a tentative step towards the dim oblong of window, and had a clear, sharp, and swiftly terrifying view of one of his eyes.
No peace. No sleep. No prospect of anything like that. The horse’s eye was stretched wide with white showing all round the usual darkness, staring not at me but as if blind, glaring wildly at nothing at all.
The black nostrils looked huge. The lips as I watched were drawing back from the teeth. The ears had gone flat to the head and there was froth forming in the mouth. It was the face, I thought incredulously, not of unrest or alarm… but of madness.
The horse backed suddenly away, crashing his hindquarters into the rear wall and rocking again forwards, but this time advancing with both forelegs off the ground, the gleams from thrashing hooves curving in silvery streaks in the gloom, the feet hitting the wall below the window with sickening intent.
I pressed in undoubted panic into the corner made by wall and door, but it gave no real protection. The box was roughly ten feet square by eight feet high, a space even at the best of times half filled by horse. For that horse at that moment it was a strait-jacket confinement out of which he seemed intent on physically smashing his way.
The manger, I thought. Get in the manger.
The manger was built at about waist height diagonally across one of the box’s rear corners; a smallish metal trough set into a sturdy wooden support. As a shelter it was pathetic, but at least I would be off the ground.…
The horse turned and stood on his forelegs and let fly backwards with an almighty double kick that thudded into the concrete wall six inches from my head, and it was then, at that moment, that I began to fear that the crazed animal might not just hurt but kill me.
He wasn’t purposely trying to attack; most of his kicks were in other directions. He wasn’t trying to bite, though his now open mouth looked savage. He was uncontrollably wild, but not with me… though that, in so small a space, made little difference.
He seemed in the next very few seconds to go utterly berserk. With speeds I could only guess at in the scurrying shadows he whirled and kicked and hurled his bulk against the walls, and I, still attempting to jump through the tempest into the manger, was finally knocked over by one of his flailing feet.
I didn’t realise at that point that he’d actually broken one of my arms because the whole thing felt numb. I made it to the manger, tried to scramble up, got my foot in… sat on the edge… tried to raise my other, now dangling foot… and couldn’t do it fast enough. Another direct hit crunched on my ankle and I knew, that time, that there was damage.
The air about my head seemed to hiss with hooves and the horse wa
s beginning a high bubbling whinny. Surely someone, I thought desperately, someone would hear the crashing and banging and come…
I could see him in flashes against the window, a rearing, bucking, kicking, rocketting nightmare. He came wheeling round, half seen, walking on his hind legs, head hard against the ceiling, the forelegs thrashing as if trying to climb invisible walls… and he knocked me off my precarious perch with a swiping punch in the chest that had half a ton of weight behind it and no particular aim.
I fell twisting onto the straw and tried to curl my head away from those lethal feet, to save instinctively one’s face and gut… and leave backbone and kidney to their fate. Another crushing thud landed on the back of my shoulder and jarred like a hammer through every bone, and I could feel a scream forming somewhere inside me, a wrenching cry for mercy, for escape, for an end to battering, for release from terror.
His mania if anything grew worse, and it was he who was finally screaming, not me. The noise filled my ears, bounced off the walls, stunning, mind-blowing, the roaring of furies.
He somehow got one hoof inside my rolled body and tumbled me fast over, and I could see him arching above me, the tendons like strings, the torment in him too, the rage of the gods bursting from his stretched throat, his forelegs so high that he was hitting the ceiling.
This is death, I thought. This is dreadful, pulverising extinction. Only for this second would I see and feel… and one of his feet would land on my head and I’d go… I’d go…
Before I’d even finished the thought his forelegs came crashing down with a hoof so close it brushed my hair; and then again, as if driven beyond endurance, he reared dementedly on his hind legs, the head going up like a reverse thunderbolt towards the sky, the skull meeting the ceiling with the force of a ram. The whole building shook with the impact, and the horse, his voice cut off, fell in a huge collapsing mass across my legs, spasms shuddering through his body, muscles jerking in stiff kicks, the air still ringing with the echoes of extremity.
